The Start of All Fears
by Dreams Call Out to Me
Summary: In the wake of the war Clara finds herself trying to forget her lives and questioning everything. Whouffle. Set in the 50th. Bit of Rose/Doctor


The Dalek was the beginning of it all. As soon as she saw it she could feel panic raising all around her body like a tide and pulling her down, drowning her and rending her incomplete. She no longer felt panic for the Doctor(s), it was for herself. Particularly that one time, in one of her other lives, during the Great Time War, when a single Dalek realised that she was using herself as a living shield to protect the Doctor and gave her hell as soon as it could. She was being played with. When her last regeneration's moments were fading away from her, when her appearance was too different and there was no hope left for her, she saw how the Dalek shot her Doctor, and how his long locks and youthful appearance changed into that of and old, withered man. _It suits the time_, she had thought.

But now everything was different, she had to convince herself that the person who died at the Time War and the person who was turned into a Dalek were not her. She could remember everything about them, but they were not _her._

'Clara!' she could her Eleven, as she had turned to call him mentally, before her. He always noticed her, even when Ten and the Dark Doctor didn't. Oh, the irony.

She didn't know when she hit the floor, but Rose's hands trying to get her up and the Doctors along with UNIT running towards her—_retreating_—didn't go unnoticed. Nor did Rose's pained expression when Eleven took her in her arms and ran towards Ten's TARDIS, UNIT and Kate already on the move to alert everyone.

Eleven carried her to the seat, while Ten and the other one tinkered with the controls.

'You're okay,' he whispered. 'You are here. I'm with you and they can't hurt you.'

She sobbed silently into his neck. It was the worst type of crying, not being able to breathe correctly, with tears streaming down her cheeks, not a single word making it out of her throat, only incoherent noises. She felt like everything was burning around her, but she was drowning. The tide, the emotions, the fear—everything she felt when she jumped into his time stream was returning. If there was something worse than death it certainly was dying and returning to life while keeping the sensation of death chocking you. Time Lords were used to it, and she was one of them once, but it was a long time ago.

'Who is she?' Rose asked Eleven.

She couldn't see his look, but Clara knew the story that he and Rose shared, so the hurt expression must have been etched instantly onto his features.

'You know I cannot tell you.'

'We're safe now, so before this gets more dangerous, you better tell us,' Ten said.

Clara could hear Ten's distrust in his voice, one he had used barely months ago with her, but for him it will be in his future. His eyes, were following her intensely, trying to figure out where he'd seen that face before, but to no avail. The Dark one, on the other hand, kept trying to look away from her—from _everyone_, in fact, as if not looking at his own future's happiness will make him forget what he had done. He was so focused on the task at hand, on the hate he felt that he needed to deny his future joy to do it. But the way he gazed at Clara made them both sick, because both knew that she had died for him on the Time War.

Eleven looked at Rose with tears in his eyes. 'You helped me so much, you made me realise so many things, and I lost you in the most possible cruel way: by my own hand. But it was for the better, for you grew, you took things into your own hands and got your happy ending, or as far as I'm concerned. I love you so much, but I was broken when I died.'—He looked at Ten pointedly—'I had to move on, to find other dreams that didn't mean Rose, other friendships, knowing fully that I could possibly ruin their lives…'

She tried to hold to his soliloquy, but the panic was raising once more—the Vashta Nerada in the library, the Time War, the Asylum, many many memories played behind her eyelids every time one of the Doctors spoke.

'Stop!' her voice finally came out. 'Please, just _stop it_!'

She opened her eyes to look at the three Doctors just arguing with each other, Rose pretty much torn between hugging Ten or Eleven, and the Other One fidgeting with the console.

'_He_ is right. Please,' she said, looking at Eleven right in the eyes. 'For this time, more than any other time, _listen to me_, because this battle is as much yours as it is mine's. You forget that you are not the only one who lost many things in the Time War, and how _I_ got turned into a Dalek. I have been as hurt by them as you have, and yet you ignore me.'

Pain shot up at every nerve for a second though, it made her feel weak, but strong as if that was exactly what she needed to go was something that had propelled her already to do so many things, simple things, like staying with Angie and Artie, after being reminded every day of the death of her own mother by their sad faces. It just felt normal in her life.

She opened her eyes, big brown orbs expressing everything she knew she would have to talk about with the Doctor later, but only hate and love guided her towards this war inside herself.

'Land the machine,' she commanded (and the TARDIS gave a noise, which she supposed it was a half angry response to being called _machine, _and a half thanked one to finally helping her thief right his wrongs.) 'We've got a fight ahead.'

The battle raged all around, her ears were numb and Clara felt extremely tired, but her life—this life—was meant to be preserved. She ended up crouching beneath a car, the Time War Doctor in front of her, his eyes following every movement of hers even when he tried to look away.

'I'm sorry, but you must understand why I did it,' his voice was barely a gasp. 'You died, you were tortured, you _know_. I hope I realise it in the future.'

'You do. And that wasn't _me_.'

The look in his face was evermore stoic, as if he felt that the moment he showed some other emotion he might break away. But his eyes couldn't lie to her, not even in his youth. In a way she could see how years and years of joy and solitude will turn him into Eleven, who always tried to show so many emotions at once to forget or hide his real ones.

Sometimes she even wondered if the looks he gave her were also a product of his chameleon way to hide himself.

This one wasn't the first Dalek she encountered, but it was the second time she was so physically close to them, and it scared her much more than she could ever imagine. The girl who had dealt with her mother's death, trying to take care of two equally broken children, who ran away (and made him come back so he could pick her up a week later) with a madman, was scared. But her fear wasn't for her life or Rose's who was trying to open the door; her fear was for the Dalek's own life.

Everything they had done to Oswin, all those days trapped, the knowledge, all that came back to her in a flash.

_Hate._

She could only see the Dalek destroying all things in its way, looking for them, but she couldn't feel a single thing. Rose's anxious whispers were lost in the buzz that was overpowering her senses and she briefly wondered if she had gone deaf when Clara realised that the buzz was actually silence. The same silence that had come before that wave of emotions had dragged her down a few hours ago. That same stillness came over her, but unlike before everything was happening around her, instead of being frozen for minutes the flashes came and went in some seconds.

Then the wave came to weigh her down, but she wasn't drowning any more. The feeling of panic was the exact same one, but she embraced it.

Death. The word she was looking to describe it was death, but for the fist time in what felt as a very long time, it wasn't hers.

She picked up the gun that the fallen soldier (_Abby_, she had to remember her, she had to make sure that the soldier was not forgotten—at least that she remembered her) had thrown at Rose once she had accepted her doom. This newfound strength went unnoticed.

Clara had always thought of how selfless was the Doctor (even when she knew that was a complete idealisation of him), the dreams that made his nights endless were about his friends, how they died, how he couldn't see many of them any more, all that people in Gallifrey—they weren't his friends but he was responsible for their death. Clara, on the other hand, dreamed time and again of her endless lives, but people only flew behind her eyes and she could only focus on those last moments.

The Dalek's gun shot went scarily close to Clara and Rose, but it only made Clara feel as if she was invincible.

She moved quietly, she knew that the Dalek had a great chance to kill her with a beam. She only had one shot… if she was lucky.

If she had only been Clara Oswald, the normal girl whose mother had died alongside other people on a strange attack, if she had only been the family's friend who had given up her dreams to help during the process of mourning and ended up staying for a year, the _thing_ that she did wouldn't have worked, but ever since she started travelling with the Doctor she was becoming fiercer and many of her echoes had fought teeth and nail to keep him safe, the shot went straight into the Dalek's eye, effectively killing him.

She felt dirty. She felt powerful. She felt _different_. Why had she done that? Why did it felt so real? Who was she?

'Who are you?' Ten asked.

'You will find out in a couple of millennia.'

His eyes were younger, but they still held that way of inspecting people, but his short time with her was not enough for him to fully scrutinise her. She gave him the most powerful and hardest lie ever when she smiled, and he the thought of her lying was only another smile, and she thought of the irony of it. He looks at her, but he doesn't see her.

The TARDIS materialised in front of the Maitland's home, earlier than usual, which freaked Clara out and she made Eleven check many times the date because Rose had told her about that one time Nine was a year late.

'You know it's your birthday, right?' Eleven said, standing close to the rails looking at her. 'She's just being nice.'

Clara was about to go out when their eyes caught each other. Pain, loss, death, and hope were written all over his, and she was sure that hers were no different. She had been there every day making her way to him, and now they were right there, in front of each other and they couldn't move. How were they supposed to let go now? She knew that there will be a day in which he is going to be the death of _her_, not some other echo who only lived for him—_her_, the person, the recipe. She had already given too much for him, all the splinters always running to _him—_she couldn't turn into one of them. Her autonomy was important, she had to get away from him, live her life.

She wasn't his moon, she was a star, far far away, burning with such intensity that he and the TARDIS could only stare in admiration. But like all other human-stars, she was meant to die early, brightness unmatchable to the life of a Time Lord, but his time span would always make the difference. He had to move on.

One of them had to give the other one away.

And yet she walked to him. She had thought that his lips would be cold, with all the death and tears and age on them, but instead his lips were alive, drenched in blood, and warm like the last breeze of heat in autumn before the dead winter kicks in. Kissing him was so different from what Clara had imagined, equally hard, but the challenge was another one.

Every part of her was running, but never to him, not truly, she had already done that too much and she was tired. Still, she wasn't running away, either; that would be counterproductive: if she ran from the demigod she had escaped with, she would be running from the truth. They had seen the same wars, and their pain was unbearable, but it wasn't the same one. They were independent, but they existed completely because of the other. None of it belittled what they had done, and they knew that they were the only people to fully understand their actions.

She realised that they were running together, hand in hand like he had told her once, the moment her father kept giving him several stern looks and kept trying to get some information about him, info which he would probably never know, but it craven into Clara and the Doctor and it would never go away.


End file.
